The Vegetable Conundrum

What do you do when you want to make a vegetarian meal but you used up your trustworthy standby Eggplant Parmesan earlier in the week? This was the dilemma I was facing this week as we invited some friends over for dinner and wanted to serve a meatless main course. I looked back on some of our earlier posts such as Vegetarian Chili, but while this was a delicious recipe, it did not seem guest worthy. Luckily we saw this recipe for Risotto Cakes while watching the new show from Michael Smith on the Food Network. As you can see the recipe can be utilized using any variation of risotto you can concoct. I used a Curtis Stone recipe for Asparagus Risotto, making it the night before so that I could form and fry the cakes the next day. The Risotto Cakes turned out great, with a crunchy outside and gooey middle. The slight variations I made to the risotto were substituting vegetable stock for the chicken stock, I left out the mint and I left out the mascarpone cheese. We served these alongside a spinach salad and zuchinni gratin.